


STORY OF MY LIFE

by spicyshimmy



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-27
Updated: 2011-10-27
Packaged: 2017-10-25 00:29:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/269631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Couldn't stop thinking about modern mages as mutants in a semi-Marvel world. And how Fenris is exactly like Wolverine. And how Anders might one day travel the Magneto path. Then, this happened. Two mutants meet, and save a stranger. <i>Anders went out back. He told the others it was to grab a smoke, but actually, it was to feed the new kittens, and to make sure their mother was doing all right.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	STORY OF MY LIFE

I.  
Anders went out back. He told the others it was to grab a smoke, but actually, it was to feed the new kittens, and to make sure their mother was doing all right.

She’d had them sometime in the night, a cold one that couldn’t have been comfortable, tucked underneath the busted shape of a cardboard box while it was raining. When Anders found her that morning, she wasn’t dead, or dying, but she wasn’t happy, either, or comfortable, or well.

He only knew they were out there because of the little chirps of newborn things squawling and mewling, and the faint smell of blood over it all.

There was no one in the side-street, and no windows faced out onto it, save for the ones that had their curtains drawn. Anders looked up, then down, then crouched next to the cardboard box, careful not to get his scent on the kittens—to turn their own mother against them, because even the best of intentions was capable of souring the deepest of bonds.

‘Pardon me,’ Anders said, very quietly. ‘Please don’t scratch me. …No, but you wouldn’t, would you? You’re much too tired for that.’

The cat regarded him warily, whiskers trembling with fine distaste, but ultimately fine acceptance. He tread a careful line, and he knew that—he always had, so he was used to the curl of the lip, the hint of sharp teeth beneath, the wariness that came with the need for assistance.

Cats were proud animals, but they were also smart ones.

Anders touched her wet back, the damp fur sticking up in odd places, smoothing it down instead of ruffling it up. She didn’t begin to purr, and he didn’t threaten the kittens, and when he began to heal her, she closed her eyes and ignored everything else.

She knew what it was. She didn’t have the same instincts as a person, and that, Anders supposed, gave him hope, that kindness was natural, that powers were meant to be used.

When he was done, she didn’t look much different than she had before, but she did start to lick one of her kittens on its tiny head. Anders leaned back, the muscles in his thighs beginning to ache, all his weight resting on the balls of his feet, the narrow strip of sole in his faded blue chucks.

II.  
Fenris had been running for a long time.

Now, he was not running. He was sitting at the counter in front of the pies, on an unsteady stool; the diner was almost empty, save for the old couple in the corner, eating their breakfasts for dinner. He could smell the syrup that they poured, the melting butter, the brew in their cups of coffee.

He barely flinched when the man peeled off the colored strip of his plastic jam packet, and scraped the inside with his knife to spread it on his toast.

Overhead, the fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered, threatening to dim. There was also a fly in the room. Both were minor irritations, which Fenris would gladly suffer for a chance to rest his feet, and wrap his hands around an off-white mug of something hot to drink.

‘Can I get you a refill, hon?’ the waitress asked. She was wearing too much perfume, and chewing a stale piece of Juicyfruit that had long since lost its playful aroma.

Fenris curled his fingers through the handle of his mug and peered into its depths. Finding its contents insufficient, he held the cup out to her, eyes on the plastic nametag pinned to the front of her yellow polyester uniform.

 _Norah,_ it said, in ugly, square letters.

‘Thank you, Norah,’ Fenris said. He took a first sip of his coffee, then scowled at the sour taste. ‘Leave the cream. …And the sugar.’

Norah provided both, the plastic creamers Fenris sometimes stacked together until they could go no higher, and a glass sugar dispenser, now half full—or half empty. There was a build-up of sweet, sticky residue around the little metal flap-hole at the top, and Fenris poked it loose with the end of his spoon, sending white grains scattering across the formica counter-top. Once they stilled, he brushed them onto the floor, wiping his hand on the torn fabric of his jeans, stained napkin crumpled in his lap.

He took another sip of the coffee, now with its additions and improvements. He allowed himself to savor it, to close his eyes, because the taste had bettered—but then, anything would, with enough sugar.

It was the same principle behind the pies.

The bell above the door tinkled from behind and to the left of the counter, Fenris’s stool by the cash register, a personal preference that made it easiest to pay and leave. It wasn’t the cold breeze that sent a shiver down the back of his neck, but the sound of steel-toed boots, and a scent he recognized before he even breathed.

They’d been trailing him for weeks, ever since he made it out of the jungle.

He hunched his shoulders, tucking the soft, worn fabric of his black scarf—now nearly gray—up around his face. He didn’t need to hear their approaching footsteps to know they were coming for him, just as a wolf did not need to _hear_ a hunter if he could smell him on the air.

He slipped free of his stool, hands shoved into his pockets, muttering ‘bathroom’—as an explanation to Norah, who would shake her head and pop her gum when she realized, _no tip_. There was no time for tips just as there was no time for gratitude, no time to think of the coffee left in his cup, or the sliced apple pie beneath its plastic case. The first lesson a man learned on the open road was how to let things go.

The second was how to kick a window from its moorings in a truck stop diner.

The clatter of glass followed. So did the screaming. Fenris had to assume they’d have enough sense to get down, while the sharp staccato of static gunfire followed him into the winter night.

III.  
Garrett couldn’t remember a time when getting the groceries wasn’t an adventure.

Dad always made it into one, pirates amongst the vegetables, oil slicks on aisle five, treks through the arctic from nothing more than a blast of cold air out of a freezer. Frozen peas and ice cream weren’t an icy tundra wind, but they were cold, and Garrett wasn’t wearing anything more than a t-shirt, gooseflesh making the hair on his arms stand on end.

He nudged down the latch, swung the door open, and reached in for one of the microwave pizzas.

‘Sorry,’ someone said, fingers brushing against his knuckles. ‘Guess I was too slow. Story of my life, really.’

‘Now, that’s no way to look at it,’ Garrett replied. ‘There’s enough bad pizza for everyone.’

He could see his competition’s face in the streaks of frost over the glass, steaming up now that the door had been open for so long. The features were all blurry, and Garrett turned toward them with a ready smile, met by stubble and a ponytail and an earring, a long nose and a crooked mouth and a very old sweater.

‘Go ahead,’ Garrett told him. ‘Take it. I’m one of the rare few people who actually _likes_ anchovies, so I think I’ll be fine.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ the stranger said, and also, ‘thank you,’ before he disappeared into the coffee and tea aisle, with one last look spared for over his shoulder.

Garrett didn’t get his name, which was a mistake, but he’d live. It wasn’t as if anything would come from it, more than a dinner and a movie and a quick goodbye, and there weren’t any good movies playing lately, at least nothing Garrett wanted to pay the price of admission on.

‘Garrett,’ Aveline said on the corner, tipping her hat as he passed by, paper bags bundled and crinkling against his chest. They were cold, frozen meals stuffed in beneath the fresh produce, chilling the inside of his elbow where he wore his old, impulsive red tattoo.

‘Looking good in that uniform, as always,’ Garrett replied.

Aveline was busy writing a ticket, slipping it behind the windshield wipers of a sedan parked in front of a fire-hydrant. But Garrett knew better, that she was also looking out for them, because she couldn’t help but stick her freckled nose into everything, and most of the time, he was grateful for the extra pair of eyes. ‘No need for flattery.’

‘I do it just to see you blush,’ Garrett told her, and fished the keys out of his pocket, turning the final corner toward home.

In one of the apartments up above, Mom was in the back room she never left, staring out the window, and Carver still wasn’t out of school. Garrett fumbled with his keys, and they fell to a bare inch above his untied sneaker, where they hung in the air instead of hitting the ground.

‘Oops,’ Garrett said.

Groceries. Adventure. At least he hadn’t done it in the middle of baked goods where a bag-boy could see him, or a grandmother buying cookies for her grandchildren.

The keys finally dropped, clattering over broken pavement. Garrett bent, like a normal person, to pick them up.

That was when he saw the blood.

There wasn’t a lot of it, dark red spattered against darker pavement, the kind of thing no one would see or think twice about in a big city, beyond the impulse to run, and _then_ call the police. Maybe. But there was a smear that might have been a handprint on the corner of Garrett’s building, and he couldn’t help himself, heading toward the narrow alley that separated his place from the old Laundromat—with half its windows boarded up and a broken neon sign that said they were _OPEN 24 OURS._

He squeezed the miniature flashlight on his key-ring, peering into the shadows along a weak beam of white light. There was a pair of boots sticking out from behind the dumpster, old and scuffed, with uneven soles, both heels worn down to nothing. The right one kept twitching, its owner curling his toes in a bid to get them warm again.

 _Well,_ Garrett thought.

There were still adventures after Dad, beyond navigating the treacherous territory between frozen foods and fresh produce.

‘Hey,’ Garrett said, and the boots disappeared, retracting like they did in that one scene from Bethany’s favorite movie. _The Wizard of Oz_ —Carver had always hated it.

But thinking about Bethany made Garrett’s throat close up, and that was an indulgence he couldn’t afford, maybe not ever but especially _not right now_. He had to be on his guard, because there was a not-so-dead body in the alleyway.

With a deep breath, Garrett took his forefinger off the flashlight, slow steps carrying him toward the Wicked Witch of the East, instead of leading him away.

If Garrett was lucky, whoever was behind door number one was the bleeder.

Mom was always worrying about fundies and zealots coming after Garrett on his way home, like they’d come after his little sister; she was just waiting for him to prove her right, certain that it would happen someday, not a matter of _if_ but always a matter of _when_.

Still, Dad always said, nobody could live in fear. They could survive it, but only with the promise of something else at the other end, something less than fear—or something greater. If Garrett let it get to him now, there’d be another chair next to Mom in the drawing room, two people staring out the window, waiting for the lost half of their family to return from a trip to the grocery store they’d never come back from.

Garrett straightened his shoulders, shifting his hold on his keys in case he had to use them as a weapon.

Better to do that than the other stuff. Telekinesis was too obvious, even in a dark alley.

‘Hello there,’ he tried again, and this time, someone hissed.

Slumped against the wall, illuminated by a gray sliver of moonlight, was a man with the most ambitious set of tattoos Garrett had ever seen. They covered his face like the lead framework of a stained-glass window, the lines drawn to shape and complement every angle, pointed chin and hard nose and even harder mouth. He was bleeding from his thigh, clutching his shoulder one-handed, fingerless gloves soaked through at the palms with blood.

That explained the handprint.

‘Leave,’ he said, fingers twitching like his combat boot.

But that would have been too easy.

IV.  
They were running late at the clinic, not enough staff for Anders to feel like he wasn’t drowning, not enough time for Anders to breathe much less check on the cat again, or her kittens. He’d bought a few cans of cat food for them, and a pizza for himself for later, something to heat up in the microwave and save half of for breakfast.

It wasn’t pretty, but at least he wasn’t the one eating the cat food.

It could have been worse.

There were people to look after, not kittens, and that was more important, though Anders’s fingers stunk of rubbing alcohol by the time he had a break, not so much soapy and clean as they were sterilized. He’d smell it when he sat down to eat, alone at the table, paper plates double-stacked so the sauce wouldn’t drip through and cause a mess, a Dixie cup with soda in it—if he was feeling fancy. He always toasted to himself, to the no-one sitting across from the table, and it went without saying that the whole thing was lonely, if predictable.

‘We’re closed, actually,’ Anders said, not looking up from the desk when the bell above the door jingled. They were between secretaries, and there was no one else to file all the paperwork, to make sure forms found their folders and folders found their drawers.

That would have been Anders’s least favorite part, except pain was his least favorite part—pain that he couldn’t fix without running the same risks he always did, just from being careless.

‘But,’ Anders added, finally glancing to the door, ‘we can always make an exception if it’s really serious—hello.’

‘Hey,’ the man from the grocery store said. ‘Oh—no, this isn’t—I definitely didn’t follow you here. I was just looking for the clinic.’

‘Story of my life,’ Anders told him.

‘Your life has a lot of stories,’ the man replied.

So long as he didn’t know how they all ended, Anders thought, and rolled back on the chair, around the desk, skidding to a halt with a pile of manila envelopes in his lap.

‘And…you’ve got blood on you,’ Anders told him. He did; Anders could smell it, but he couldn’t feel accompanying pain, which meant the man wasn’t the one who was bleeding.

He’d seen weirder days, and more unexpected, but he was ready to push the panic button all the same.

‘Garrett,’ the man said. ‘You’ve got blood on you…Garrett. Anyway, I was just wondering—do you do house calls?’

*

Anders needed help locking up, which Garrett gave, rolling down the metal store-front they only had because the clinic was run out of what used to be a deli. It helped keep the painkillers safe, for one, and though it didn’t prevent break-ins during the night, it made them more difficult, less frequent, which was better than nothing.

Garrett bent down, snapping the padlock into place. ‘Is that it?’ he asked over his shoulder.

‘That’s it,’ Anders replied.

Garrett wiped the metal smell off his palms onto the back pockets of his jeans. ‘Small world,’ he said.

Anders fussed with the buttons of his sweater. ‘Small town, actually.’

‘Not small enough,’ Garrett said. He was wearing an old windbreaker that was half a size too small for him, speaking of _small_ , thick wrists sticking out from the ends of the sleeves. ‘Otherwise we’d have white picket fences and a corner store where the owner knew everyone’s name.’

His neck was bare, a sight that made Anders burrow deeper into the warmth of his moth-eaten scarf, pulling on an itchy old hat that Karl had knit for him while working the graveyard shift.

‘Doctor Thekla, knitting,’ Anders had said, mentioning it was unbearably cute, to which Karl had replied that everyone needed a hobby, including and especially Anders himself.

‘You watch too much television,’ Anders told Garrett, then offered him a thin smile, because real life wasn’t all like a story, and a stranger couldn’t be expected to know when he was kidding around.

He’d grabbed one of the clinic’s three portable first aid kits, after checking to make sure it was properly stocked with gauze and bandages, a curved needle for stitches and the specialized thread that Karl always said reminded him of fishing line. Garrett had been vague about the injury they were dealing with, but Anders had discovered that was the case with most people who didn’t know a concussion from a bruise, or a scrape from an infection.

Most people didn’t have to know the difference.

‘Can we go now?’ Garrett asked, chafing his palms together in the cold.

‘Lead the way,’ Anders replied, with a glance toward the light above the door. He turned it off every night before he went home; their electricity bills were high enough already, and he wasn’t in the business of giving people false hope, or in the business of anything.

*

They took the train two stops, uptown on the same line Anders used to get to the nearest food co-op. He held the first aid kit between his knees, and Garrett stood in front of him, body swaying with the motion of the train. When he lifted his head to look out the window, Anders could see an old bruise on his throat, and an older scab hidden at the corner of his jaw, beneath the shape of his beard.

‘This is us.’ Garrett shoved his hands into the pockets of his windbreaker, shouldering the train door open, waiting for Anders to step out first.

Anders did. The doors tried to close, and left a streak of dirt on Garrett’s sleeve, from his shoulder to his elbow, one he didn’t bother brushing off.

‘You’ve got a little something,’ Anders said, and brushed it off for him.

Garrett led them out of the station after that, around the nearest street corner, into an alley so dark that Anders could barely see the puff of his breath in front of his face. He tried to blow a smoke ring, but it wasn’t cold enough for that yet, just a nip in the air that heightened after dark.

He was starting to get a funny feeling about everything—a funny feeling he’d tried his best to ignore, because there was no reason to think a stranger was out to get him.

No reason except precedent, and common sense. Anders’s fingers were sweating under his mittens when Garrett finally stopped short, standing over what looked like a pile of garbage at his feet.

‘I thought I told you to leave,’ the garbage said.

Garrett shrugged, unzipping his windbreaker and slipping it off. ‘You mumble. I’m hard of hearing. It was an easy mistake to make. Also, I _did_ leave. You just didn’t say anything about coming back— He didn’t say anything about coming back.’

‘The garbage is talking,’ Anders said.

The garbage snorted. There was a scuffle, in which Garrett attempted to cover it with his windbreaker, and the garbage protested. ‘Now where have I heard _that_ before? _The garbage is talking._ How original.’

‘He won’t give me a name.’ Garrett pinned the windbreaker in place. Anders was still standing, but that was only because there was more to this than there was to healing a sick cat while no one was looking.

There were no kittens, for one thing.

It was more serious, for another.

Blood had a smell; this blood smelled stronger, and not just because there was so much of it, but because it was marked by something deeper than pain, more spilled than was left, followed by the chill that settled into numb limbs and locked them in place. If Anders closed his eyes, he could feel the uncomfortable heartbeat, so much slower than his own, and knew the situation was serious. Hospital-serious, though something told him there wasn’t time for that anymore—the same instincts that saved other people’s lives, and kept ruining his own, or trying to.

They did their best.

‘I don’t have enough bandages for this,’ Anders said.

‘Then why,’ the garbage replied, ‘are you not leaving?’

That was a good question. All the hardest ones were. Anders crouched at Garrett’s side and their knees bumped, the wind picking up against the windbreaker, and broken by it. Their patient didn’t shiver; Anders didn’t know if he _was_ their patient yet.

‘Um,’ Anders said.

‘That was my reaction,’ Garrett agreed. ‘That, and I _love_ the tattoos.’

There was only one option left, though Anders’s throat was dry just thinking about it. He knew how stupid it was, which made it more appealing and also less pleasant. His stomach felt stupid because he was stupid—most people were, about the stupidest things, and there was no healing that with a palm against matted fur, soothing words and dangerous power.

Anders pushed his hair out of his face, behind his ear, the shell of which was pink and cold and stung when he touched it. Then, he tugged off his gloves with his teeth, biting the empty fingertips, letting them drop into his lap.

‘Just…hold him steady,’ Anders said.

Garrett shifted around to the right side, shoulder against shoulder. Their patient protested, but he didn’t have the strength for it, and now that they all knew, the pretense lost its sharper edges.

Anders thought he saw disgust, widened eyes, parted lips. Maybe it was just a trick of his own conscience.

‘Story of my life,’ Anders said, and healed one more stranger who hadn’t asked.

*

He passed out pretty early on, but by the time Anders was finished—reeling backward, sitting down hard on his ass against the cold cement—everything was fine again.

As fine as it could be. As scared as he was.

But Garrett didn’t call Anders anything, _mutie_ or _freak_ or any of the other expected words, which hurt less and less, but meant more and more as time wore on. He didn’t reach for his cell phone to call the authorities, or start shouting, or—and this was Anders’s favorite—spit in his face to demean him, to lessen him.

He leaned back against the alley wall instead, in the glow from the sign over the Laundromat. ‘What now?’ he asked, looking as tired as Anders felt.

Anders rubbed his fingers together, trying to get real warmth back into the tips.

‘We take him back to the clinic, I guess,’ he said. ‘Which won’t be easy. Unconscious people are always so _heavy_.’

‘Actually,’ Garrett replied, ‘I think I can help with that.’

 **THE BEGINNING**


End file.
